Wednesday, June 17, 2015

OATP primary

OATP primary

Copyright and Open Access Assistant (YCW Position) | Faculty of Information

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 10:42 AM PDT

"Ryerson University Library and Archives is currently seeking a Copyright and Open Access Assistant to aid with the creation of two subject specific LibGuides and well as the updating of Scholarly Communication and Copyright webpages. As well the successful candidate would expected to assist with updating transactional permissions in the University copyright database. The primary objective of this project is to create two new detailed, rich and informative LibGuides, one that focuses on Copyright and one that focuses on Scholarly Communication issues. Both will act as a core resource for information about copyright and scholarly communication at Ryerson University, and be useful for both faculty and students. These are new resources. The Copyright LibGuide will deal with issues of: instructor copyright compliance at the University including E-Reserves, student copyright information, copyright basics, fair dealing and other copyright exceptions, copyright exceptions, and copyright-free and Creative Commons resources that can be used in teaching and by students (open educational resources). The Scholarly Communication LibGuide will include an overview of Open Access, information of the Ryerson Digital Repository, the Open Access Author Fund, self-archiving strategies, predatory open access journals, basics of bibliometrics, author publishing agreements, the Tri-Council Open Access policy, open access journals (green versus gold), and an Open Access Resource reading list...."

The importance of Institutional APIs

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:24 AM PDT

"We were at the fantastic 'Open Repositories' conference last week and as usual it was a great mix of developer chat and bigger picture thinking. Our main focus at the conference was to discuss workflows with existing institutional infrastructure, such as their institutional repository (IR). A number of institutions have spent years developing their IRs to keep them user-friendly and full of open access papers. With recent changes to funder mandates and policies, institutions are faced with the need for systems to better manage all of the other digital products of research. In order to be compliant with the funder mandates, we have been providing IRs for institutions who either do not have an IR at the moment, or feel it is more efficient in terms of time and money to use the 'figshare for institutions' set up over massive customizations to repositories like ePrints or DSpace. For the cases where an institution has an existing IR for papers or theses, we want to make sure that all workflows deposit these outputs in the correct place. For this reason, we have been looking at streamlining deposits between systems using our API. API, an abbreviation of application program interface, is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. The API specifies how software components should interact and APIs are used when programming graphical user interface (GUI) components. As well as integrations with other tools used by an institution, such as DuraCloud, we are also using the API to plug into existing storage at a University. Previously, end users as well as other tools have used our free API to make data in figshare discoverable through other systems. This API based system development has several benefits, not limited to interoperability.  Perhaps more important, is the need for APIs for academic reuse. APIs are as essential as persistent identifiers when it comes to research data. A great example of this recently is theSHARE infrastructure, developed by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, and the Center for Open Science. SHARE is a higher education initiative whose mission is to maximize research impact by making a comprehensive inventory of research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. They have already plugged into several APIs, of which figshare now makes up 13% of the content ..."

Open Data Is Not Enough - ORD2015 keynote by Mark Parsons, RDA Secretary General | RDA

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:21 AM PDT

"Open Data Is Not Enough - Mark Parsons, RDA Secretary General gives the keynote lecture at conference 'Open Research Data: Implications for Science and Society', Warsaw, Poland, May 28–29, 2015. The ORD2015 Conference was organised by the the Open Science Platform — an initiative of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling at the University of Warsaw."

The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-profit Publishing | The Scholarly Kitchen

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:19 AM PDT

" ... It is worth thinking a bit about what it means to have for-profit and NFP publishers striving side by side. It is such an unusual circumstance. How many NFPs are there in aviation? In cable television? If you are unhappy with your wireless phone carrier, is there a mission-based alternative? Does the contractor who worked on my kitchen have to compete with an NFP organization, whose sole aim is to improve housing and whose surplus goes right back into other housing projects? While there are NFP publishers in almost every segment of publishing (e.g., the Sierra Club, which is a specialized trade publisher), it is only in scholarly publishing where the NFPs are truly prominent. Just think of some of the names: AAAS, The New England Journal of Medicine, The American Chemical Society, IEEE, The American Physical Society, and that upstart PLOS. And let's not forget the 134 members of the AAUP, the university press association, which cumulatively publishes just under 15,000 titles a year and bears the principal responsibility for academic certification in the humanities. In my experience the for-profit and NFP participants in scholarly publishing have a great deal of influence on one another, though it is not always acknowledged. The obvious illustration to put forward in this regard is to state the truism that we all live within the economy whether we like it or not. That's a bitter pill to swallow for many people in the NFP sector, including countless librarians, OA advocates, funding agencies, and university administrators, but you can no more operate outside the economy than you can outside of history. For-profit organizations recognize this and exploit it, often to the disadvantage of NFPs. Indeed, one of the unfortunate aspects of NFP publishing is how the appeal to an organization's mission often encourages the NFP publisher to let its guard down. This is why the largest scholarly publishers today, and not incidentally the most influential in the overall marketplace, are all for-profit firms. They know how this world works and play hard and tough. A common NFP blunder is to focus on the wrong metric or on one good metric at the exclusion of others. So, for example, it's not uncommon for an NFP publisher to boast about its impact factor (IF) even as it loses market share year by year. At some point that will catch up to the complacent publisher when the market-based realization is finally brought home; and that realization is that a high IF without a stable and growing market share ultimately leads to a drop in submissions and an erosion of IF ..."

EO Open Science 2.0 at ESA/Esrin (12-14 Oct 2015) | GSDI

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:11 AM PDT

"The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing for innovative Earth Observation (EO) scientific exploitation activities – referred as Earth Observation Open Science 2.0 - to maximize the scientific benefits of Earth Observation (EO) data by capitalizing on the digital revolution. In this context, ESA is organizing a community consultation meeting (http://www.eoscience20.org) in Esrin (Frascati, Italy) on 12-14 Oct 2015 to explore to the new challenges and opportunities for EO research created by the rapid advances in Information and Communications Technologies. These include open tools and software, data-intensive science, virtual research environment, e-infrastructure, citizen science, crowdsourcing, advanced visualization, e-learning and education of the new generation of Data scientists. The conference will present precursor activities in EO Open Science and Innovation and develop a Roadmap preparing for future ESA scientific exploitation activities. The conference will be followed by a Hackathon on 15-16 Oct in ESRIN for interested developers."

Peer-review journals monopolize research, hurt students and faculty | The Daily Texan

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:09 AM PDT

" ... The journals — documenters and disseminators of humanity's scientific progress — collectively charge billions of dollars worldwide for publishing rights to the research they largely receive for free from researchers. Publication is exclusive, meaning each journal is the sole source of its research articles: there is no direct market competition. This makes each journal a miniature monopoly, allowing them to charge whatever price they like for the research articles they receive for free. The markups are shocking. A single subscription by an institution, such as UT, to The Journal of Chromatography costs $18,863. And with profit margins at a hefty 37%, Chromotography publisher Elsevier can only shrug its shoulders and offer a guilty grin at the outrageous price. While not all journals are as expensive, the fact that the publishers share none of their profits with the research authors is heinous ..."

Elsevier acts against research article pirate sites and claims irreparable harm

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:07 AM PDT

"The academic publisher Elsevier last week filed a complaint against two web sites who it accuses of pirating its academic articles and other publications and offering them up to the world for free. Elsevier is responsible for 25% of the world's market for peer-reviewed academic publications published in journals that include The Lancet, New Scientist, LexisNexis, and Cell. It also provides a way for students, academics and other researchers to search for publications through a product called ScienceDirect which offers access to information and content of 2,500 journals and 26,000 book titles. Of course, only organisations that license ScienceDirect can get access to these papers, normally universities and research institutes. Others have to pay on an article-by-article basis with articles costing around US $31.50 for each download. In the normal process of research, academics may read a large number of papers which makes paying on a per-paper basis, prohibitively expensive. It is for this reason that people have turned to accessing pirated copies of these papers through sites such as the ones named in Elsevier's complaint. Elsevier allege that a website called Sci-Hub is using ScienceDirect credentials obtained through students and academics to access and copy pirated academic papers. It normally doesn't track logons to the system and being on a network associated with a university is often enough to gain access. People visiting the Sci-Hub site are presented with a search bar that carries out a search through a modified version of Google's academic search site, Google Scholar. Linked articles are then fetched from the other site named in Elsevier's complaint, called Libgen, or the Library Genesis Project. Libgen acts as a repository for pdfs of the articles obtained from ScienceDirect and other sources. The majority of Libgen's and Sci-Hub's traffic comes from countries like Iran, China, Russia, Brazil, and India. Although the US originates the second highest amount of traffic for Sci-Hub ..."

Opening access to genes and environment research - On Biology

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:05 AM PDT

"Genotype is only a part of an organism's overall being. Environmental factors can be a significant contributor to phenotype, as demonstrated by differences observed in identical twins. Diseases such as skin cancer from overexposure to ultraviolet light also show the impact that the environment can have on our gene expression. Covering the area of environmental mutagens, Genes and Environment, the official journal of the Japanese Environmental Mutagen Society, has published its first articles today with BioMed Central ... The journal publishes articles across a broad range of topics including environmental mutagenesis and carcinogenesis, environmental genomics and epigenetics, molecular epidemiology, genetic toxicology and regulatory sciences.  One of the above areas that I find particularly fascinating is epigenetics: the study of heritable changes affecting gene expression without changing the genetic sequence. This can involve external factors that cause chemical changes to occur in our genomes, such as environmental mutagens.  It is well known that radiation and certain chemicals can cause genetic mutations that lead to cancer, aging etc. These mutations often change the genetic sequence and consequently modify gene expression, such as by deactivating a tumor suppressor gene, leading to uncontrolled cell division ..."

allAfrica.com: Africa: New Web Portal Provides Open Data On Food and Nutrition Security in Africa

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 02:02 AM PDT

"While Africa south of the Sahara has made substantial improvements to its food security in recent years, one in four people in the region remains undernourished. A new web portal launched today that focuses on agriculture, food security, and nutrition in Africa south of the Sahara has been designed to strengthen capacity for timely food security information, policy research, and analysis to ensure the continued improvement of the region's food and nutrition security ... The blogs on the portal provide detailed summaries of recent research on a variety of topics related to food and nutrition security, including food access, input markets, and risk and resilience. It is hoped that this environment of open information-sharing and dialogue will help to increase the resilience of the region's poor to possible food-related crises, including price and climate shocks ...The portal also hosts a series of interactive maps tracking important economic and agricultural indicators throughout the continent, including cereal yields, harvest times, and soil composition. But as Dr. Torero points out, the portal's major innovation will be its people ..."

ORoPO open patent register launched | IPPro The Internet news | ipprotheinternet.com

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:58 AM PDT

"Microsoft and IBM have launched ORoPO, an open register, global database of patents, which is voluntary and not-for-profit. All of the data uploaded into ORoPO is free of IP restrictions and is available to the public as open data. Patent owners can update patent information for free. Erich Andersen, vice president and deputy general counsel at Microsoft, said: "Microsoft believes that patent ownership transparency continues to be an important part of a well-functioning patent system." BAE Systems and music-identifier app Shazam have also backed the register. David Kappos, former director of the US Patent Trademark Office and Sir Nigel Shadbolt, co-founder of the Open Data Institute are on the advisory board supporting the register ..."

Key Takeaways from the Open Data Science Conference 2015 | Georgian PartnersGeorgian Partners

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:56 AM PDT

"A couple of weeks ago I attended the Open Data Science Conference (ODSC) in Boston. Held over two days, ODSC brought together practitioners and thought leaders in the open source and data science fields. The agenda was rich with 72 presentations and 21 workshops, and was kicked off with keynotes from Anthony Goldbloom (Kaggle's CEO) and Josh Wills (the Senior Director of Data Science at Cloudera). I know that many of you are time-poor, so before I go into detail about the conference, here are my three main takeaways: Data science teams are rapidly adopting tools that help them be more productive in key areas including data wrangling (e.g., Trifacta and DataKitchen) and in the area of machine learning 'as a service' and large-scale machine learning platforms (e.g., DataRobot, Azure Machine Learning, AWS Machine Learning, and H2O). The open source data science ecosystem is vibrant and growing quickly. The most popular modeling environments being languages like R, Python, and toolkits such as Vowpal Wabbit and H2O. Anthony Goldbloom captured the mood at the conference when he said "No one wins competitions on Kaggle using SAS or SPSS." All this data science activity is helping bring new applied analytics solutions to market in a range of industries including CRM for healthcare and workplace optimization. That's the quick version, you can read more below about what I felt were some of the highlights from #OSDC 2015, including links to presentations and further reading ..."

Open Data as Open Educational Resources - Case Studies: Call for Participation

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:53 AM PDT

"Open Data is invaluable to support researchers, but we contend that open datasets used as Open Educational Resources (OER) can also be invaluable asset for teaching and learning. The use of real datasets can enable a series of opportunities for students to collaborate across disciplines, to apply quantitative and qualitative methods, to understand good practices in data retrieval, collection and analysis, to participate in research-based learning activities which develop independent research, teamwork, critical and citizenship skills. (For more detail please see: http://education.okfn.org/the-21st-centurys-raw-material-using-open-data-as-open-educational-resources) The Call: We are inviting individuals and teams to submit case studies describing experiences in the use of open data as open educational resources. Proposals are open to everyone who would like to promote good practices in pedagogical uses of open data in an educational context. The selected case studies will be published in a open e-book (CC_BY_NC_SA) hosted by Open Knowledge Foundation Open Education Group http://education.okfn.org by mid September 2015. Participation in the call requires the submission of a short proposal describing the case study (of around 500 words), all proposal must be written in English, however, the selected authors will have the opportunity to submit the case both in English and another language, as our aim is to support the adoption of good practices in the use of open data in different countries ..."

Open data as anti-poverty tool must get smarter

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:51 AM PDT

" ... But solid evidence of the revolutionary promise that open data is making governments more efficient and responsive is surprisingly hard to find. Ironically, there is just no data yet to prove it. One problem, said Stefaan Verhulst who is co-founder of the Governance Lab at New York University, is that while there has been a whole lot of time and money spent on the technology to digitise, standardise and publish data, less time has been spent on identifying what problems open data can solve. The result is that open data is not used in a smart way and supply has outstripped demand. Without clear objectives, it is difficult to measure results, he said at a World Bank conference last week to chart the impact of open data. 'You first need to identify the value you want to create,' Verhulst said. One way to do that is to gather stakeholders together to discuss what gems might be buried in government data and then share innovative ideas on how to mine it, said Joel Gurin, president of Open Data Enterprise and former head of a White House group on smart disclosure. In fact, Gurin thinks only 20 percent of government data may be really valuable ..."

It's Time To Embrace Open Access In Publishing

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:48 AM PDT

" ... David Burkus, author of The Myths of Creativity: The Truth About How Innovative Companies and People Generate Great Ideas, argues, 'One of the single most effective ways to enhance your creativity is to regularly break the cycle of isolation and interact, talk, and share your work with your colleagues and friends.' OA is a movement to be embraced, not shunned. Sharing 'work, setbacks, and insights can amplify the creativity produced by each,' Burkus concludes. In a corporate setting, that means greater efficiency and profits ... Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory traces the OA Movement in publishing to the 1990s with the development of OA journals and the Open Archives Initiative, followed by the promulgation of an OA policies registry. The OA Movement took on the appearance of a freight train barreling down hill.  However, there are still scholarly journals today holding out for big subscription fees limiting gratis and libre access to those not able or willing to pay. Some university publishers and NGOs like the Mellon Foundation are funding alternative approaches for meeting OA demand in PDF form online.  The Council on Library and Information Resources reports in Trends in Electronic Publishing that it is more cost efficient to publish information on the Web ..."

BishopBlog: My collapse of confidence in Frontiers journals

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:43 AM PDT

"Frontiers journals have become a conspicuous presence in academic publishing since they started in 2007 with the advent of Frontiers in Neuroscience. When they were first launched, I, like many people, was suspicious. This was an Open Access (OA) online journal where authors paid to publish, raising questions about the academic rigour of the process. However, it was clear that the publishers had a number of innovative ideas that were attractive to authors, with a nice online interface and a collaborative review process that made engagement with reviewers more of a discussion than a battle with anonymous critics. Like many other online OA journals, the editorial decision to publish was based purely on an objective appraisal of the soundness of the study, not on a subjective evaluation of importance, novelty or interest. As word got round that respectable scientists were acting as editors, reviewers and authors of paper in Frontiers, people started to view it as a good way of achieving fast and relatively painless publication, with all the benefits of having the work openly available and accessible to all. The publishing model has been highly successful. In 2007, there were 45 papers published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, whereas in 2014 it was 3,012 (data from Scopus search for source title Frontiers in Neuroscience, which includes Frontiers journals in Human Neuroscience, Cellular Neuroscience, Molecular Neuroscience, Behavioral Neuroscience, Systems Neuroscience, Integrative Neuroscience, Synaptic Neuroscience, Aging Neuroscience, Evolutionary Neuroscience and Computational Neuroscience). If all papers attracted the author fee of US$1900 (£1243) for a regular article, this would bring in £3.7 million pounds in 2014: the actual income would be less than this because some articles are cheaper, but it's clear that the income is any in case substantial, especially since the journal is online and there are no print costs. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Frontiers has expanded massively since 2007 to include a wide range of disciplines.  A Scopus search for articles with journal title that includes 'Frontiers in' found over 54,000 articles since 2006, with 10,555 published in 2014.  With success, however, have come growing rumbles of discontent. Questions are being raised about the quality of editing and reviewing in Frontiers.  My first inkling of this was a colleague told me he would not review for Frontiers because his name was published with the article. This wasn't because he wanted confidentiality; rather he was concerned that it would appear he had given approval for the article, when in fact he had major reservations .."

NHMRC initiatives to improve access to research outputs and findings | Medical Journal of Australia

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:38 AM PDT

"The National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) funds about $850 million of Australia's best medical research each year. To continuously deliver tangible health benefits to the Australian community, NHMRC has implemented a suite of initiatives to maximise the returns from this investment. In April 2015, NHMRC released a statement encouraging its funded researchers to improve their data sharing practices (http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/grants-funding/policy/nhmrc-statement-data-sharing). The statement says: 'NHMRC encourages data sharing and providing access to data and other research outputs (metadata, analysis code, study protocols, study materials and other collected data) arising from NHMRC supported research.'  This is an ethos consistent with the 2007 Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research (http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/guidelines-publications/r39) and a practice that stands to benefit all Australian researchers and those who fund Australian research. NHMRC's statement on data sharing follows the NHMRC Open Access Policy (http://www.nhmrc.gov.au/grants-funding/policy/nhmrc-open-access-policy), which was implemented in July 2012 and requires that: 'any publication arising from NHMRC supported research must be deposited into an open access institutional repository and/or made available in another open access format within a twelve month period from the date of publication.'  NHMRC also requires all clinical trials it funds to be registered with a clinical trials registry. These initiatives are aligned with the strong global movement for open access to research information. Greater transparency of research and better use and reuse of data will ensure that waste in research is minimised, while improving the reproducibility and value derived from research. NHMRC will continue to ensure that its assessment processes are rigorous, that only the most significant research ideas are funded, and that access to research results remains as open as possible."

FORCE2016 Conference | FORCE11

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:31 AM PDT

Use the link to access more information about the upcoming event.  "Force11 is a community of scholars, librarians, archivists, publishers and research funders that has arisen organically to help facilitate the change toward improved knowledge creation and sharing. Individually and collectively, we aim to bring about a change in modern scholarly communications through the effective use of information technology. Force11 has grown from a small group of like-minded individuals into an open movement with clearly identified stakeholders associated with emerging technologies, policies, funding mechanisms and business models. While not disputing the expressive power of the written word to communicate complex ideas, our foundational assumption is that scholarly communication by means of semantically enhanced media-rich digital publishing is likely to have a greater impact than communication in traditional print media or electronic facsimiles of printed works. However, to date, online versions of 'scholarly outputs' have tended to replicate print forms, rather than exploit the additional functionalities afforded by the digital terrain. We believe that digital publishing of enhanced papers will enable more effective scholarly communication, which will also broaden to include, for example, the publication of software tools, and research communication by means of social media channels. We see Force11 as a starting point for a community that we hope will grow and be augmented by individual and collective efforts by the participants and others. We invite you to join and contribute to this enterprise."

European Parliament committee adopts controversial pro-user copyright reform report | Ars Technica UK

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:27 AM PDT

"A report proposing major changes to copyright laws in the EU has been adopted by the European Parliament's Legal Affairs committee (JURI) after it spent several hours voting on 550 amendments. The report was written by the German Pirate Party's Julia Reda, and had attracted widespread praise and criticism from different quarters. Some of the report's original ideas included: a single copyright valid across the entire EU; placing works created by employees of government, public administration, and the courts as part of their official duty in the public domain (that is, with no copyright); allowing audio-visual quotation (in online videos, for example); enshrining freedom of panorama (the ability to take pictures of public buildings and distribute them without permission of the architect); and allowing the public to circumvent DRM in order to make use of exceptions to copyright.  The report as adopted includes a call for at least some copyright exceptions—which are designed to safeguard important rights such as quotation, parody, or research and education—to be made uniform across the EU. Currently, each member state has adopted a different set of exceptions for its national laws. The report also calls for these exceptions to be safeguarded against override by contractual or technical means—DRM, for example.  As well as measures that would strengthen protection of authors in contract negotiations, the newly adopted report hopes to make it easier for libraries to lend e-books and to digitise their analogue collections, as well as for scientists to conduct text and data mining to extract new information from academic papers available online.

An important victory was the rejection of text that would have granted publishers a so-called "ancillary" (extra) copyright, which would have required online search engines to pay for the use of even small snippets. German publishers have already experienced first-hand what happens under such systems: when Google stopped using snippets from publications in order to avoid paying licence fees that publishers had demanded, German newspapers and magazines found that the number of visitors to their sites dropped precipitously ..."

OpenAIRE2020 and the FP7 Post-Grant Gold OA Pilot | Jisc Scholarly Communications

Posted: 17 Jun 2015 01:21 AM PDT

"Since January 2015 Jisc has been participating in the EU-funded OpenAIRE2020 project and acting as the UK National Open Access Desk (NOAD). In this role, Jisc will inform HEIs, researchers and policymakers about the latest EU Open Access policy developments, compliance procedures and related infrastructure. Among other activities, Jisc will be providing information, guidance and resources to Horizon 2020 project coordinators and researchers, research libraries and research managers on:  The Horizon 2020 Open Access policy and how to comply with the policy; The Open Research Data Pilot, the scope of the pilot and the data management plan;  The FP7 Post-Grant Gold Open Access Pilot features, technical requirements and funding request process ..."

uniko and FWF recommend support of the Directory of Open Access Journals | FWF - Science Fund, 06.17.2015 | APA-OTS

Posted: 16 Jun 2015 09:41 PM PDT

uniko and FWF recommend support of the Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ enables free, quality-assured registration of scientific open access journals Vienna (OTS / FWF) - The Austrian University Conference (uniko) and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) recommend research and funding institutions, as well as those responsible for research policy to support the "Directory of Open Access Journals" (DOAJ). For this purpose a joint letter of uniko and FWF was written and published now. DOAJ is a freely accessible, non-commercial database that organizes a quality-assured registration of scientific open access journals. DOAJ can naturally be supported not only by scientific organizations, but by all those who are interested, that scientific results are made freely available worldwide.
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